In 1963 Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad demonstrated something we are still catching up to: that a drawing could be a program, and changing one constraint could rebuild the whole geometry. Twenty-one years later a Hungarian physicist, Gábor Bojár, shipped that idea to architects as the first BIM software — Archicad, 1984. We keep that lineage in view because the next PAZ-Next session sits squarely on it: PAZ-BOX 9 Archicad Add-ons, a working morning where we open the box and drive each tool against a live project rather than a slide.

The signal is simple. Add-ons have stopped being convenience macros and started being where the office’s real logic lives. HuskyBIM’s own guide, AI for Archicad: Automate with Claude, puts it plainly — you can now read elements, zones, layers and properties and edit BIM data “without writing a line of GDL or Python.” That is the same move our in-house tools make from the other direction: they take a task you do by hand two hundred times and turn it into one parameter.

←TODAY: In 2026 you can drive an Archicad model in plain English — no line of GDL required. →3012: By our Zurich-3012 horizon the office is not the software; it is the intention the software is asked to carry out. Fulcrum: An add-on earns a place in your practice only when it survives the person who wrote the macro walking out the door.

Look at what is actually in the box and the pattern is consistent. Raumstempelfix aligns hundreds of room stamps at once, holding separate positions for 1:200, 1:100, 1:50 and 1:20 inside one project — the scale-dependent labour that quietly eats a Bauleitung afternoon. Volumenstudie converts 2D site polylines into complete Archicad massing — walls, slabs, zone stamps, envelope — with the FAR/GFZ distributed across the plot, testing variants in minutes instead of hours. Fassadengenerator moves façade edits from remodelling to parameter changes, so the whole team shares one façade logic instead of each hand interpreting it differently. And PAZGPT reaches the same place HuskyBIM describes — chat and voice against the model — through our own Archicad automation stack.

None of this is magic and it is not free of cost: every parametric tool trades away some ad-hoc flexibility for consistency, and a team that leans on a generator without reading its output will ship confident, uniform mistakes. That trade is a property of automation itself, not a fault of any one add-on — which is exactly why we teach reading the model, not just running the button.

Atelier: For the Büro adopting AI this year, the risk is not that the tools are weak — it is that they get bought, demoed once, and never wired into a real deliverable. The session is built against that: bring a live plan set and leave having run one add-on through to a permit-ready output. Your one Monday move — pick the single most repetitive Archicad task on your current job (room stamps, a façade variant, an early massing) and time it once by hand, so you can measure what a parameter-driven pass actually gives back.

Hack: Count every zone in the open plan before you touch a single stamp — the model already knows its own rooms, so ask it. Graphisoft ships a Python package that attaches to a running Archicad over its JSON API; four lines pull the whole zone list so a batch alignment pass has something to iterate over instead of your mouse. This is the seam every add-on in the box widens: the model as a queryable database, not a drawing.

from archicad import ACConnection
conn  = ACConnection.connect()          # attaches to the open Archicad
zones = conn.commands.GetElementsByType('Zone')   # every room in the plan
print(f"{len(zones)} zones — feed these ids to a batch stamp pass")

The lineage matters because a school that only sells its tools dies, and one that only re-tells its history fossilises. Archicad’s Grasshopper connection turned ten this year; the parametric habit is no longer new. What is new is that the same habit now reaches the documentation layer — the stamps, the schedules, the permit set — where most offices still work by hand. Bring your worst repetitive task to the morning, and turn it into a parameter you never have to redraw.